[WIP] Dark Star

Hello there!
Dark Star is our latest project and I wanted to share some of the organised madness that has gone into bringing it from this:

to this:


Dark Star is still very much in progress so thoughts, comments and feedback are more welcome and encouraged! Also if you have any questions on how we got something working then I'll do my best to explain the magic (i.e. duct tape and luck) behind the velvety curtain

So that is it? DS is a kinda a cross between old classics like Afterburner and Spaceharrier mixed with a bit of bullet hell and infinite runner. The idea was to have things moving fast and exploding often.

Our aim is to bring it out on Windows and iOS devices in the next few months. It could be cool to run a bit of an open test on it at a later date, so if ya interested in giving DS a poke I'll post more details here once I figure out the best approach.

Next up, spaceships and prototypes!

 

Alrighty, so starting of with a dream, a cube and a twinkle in my eye, we quickly knocked together a quick screenshot of how we thought things could work.



Originally the though was to have the life behind the ship, removing all the hud (I think 'Blur' did this originally, anyway, I saw it somewhere, liked it and thought I'd pinch it). Things didn't really work out - when the ship was in the middle of the screen all the useful into would vanish and it became a bugger to keep track of if your thumb covered things.

Since we knew this would be working on phones (as well as PC), I wanted to make sure we could get the visual density of things correct. Often in the past things like draw calls could be tricky to manage especially if your trying to get tens / hundreds of objects on screen and in motion at once. With this in mind, base assets were created.







Quite a bit of time was spent on the ship, trying to figure out just how articulate it should be. In the end the spaceships ended up smaller and moving a hell of a lot quicker than the initial tests, so most of the articulation on the spaceships is hardly readable in game, which is a shame.

https://vine.co/v/Ou1UeJbvl2T <- to see the articulation in motion

However, this initial ship did not read well when viewed from behind, so the second ship was modelled up:




And with that we had something to fly and something to shoot at

 

Afternoon!

With some basic bits to play with and an explosion (https://vine.co/v/OmZIZVea3ia does anyone know how to embed vine clips into forum posts?), we started to pull the ideas together.



This is the earliest shot I could find.

The basic idea, along the lines of Spaceharrier, is that bad dudes fling themselves at you (usually while shooting) and you aim to shoot them into explosions first. Explosions are always key. For this game we created a tube that would allow objects to orbit around planets, canyons, etc. towards the player to break things up a little from the normal head on approach.

Also, from the above shot you can see the crappy silhouettefor the player's ship (bottom left). Because of this, the ship was demoted pretty quickly to being additional fodder.

Here's a movement test with the replacement ship: https://vine.co/v/OKFmn2Zeqlv

One of the ideas we liked was to have the ability to 'speed up' your ship at will. We dropped this idea once we got into balancing the levels a little (you generally ended up with too much to do without worrying about speed controls on top).

Here are a few additional early screenshots, warts and all:





Thumb sticks on mobile - this was dropped fairly late in the game. One of the problems I found was that I became a master of the controls, bobbing, weaving and exploding with ease. The problem was that I was the only person that could do it without swearing to unholy gods - which was probably a bad sign.

After watching my friends son play a handful of games, I realised the controls really needed to be a lot more intuitive. As such the sticks were dropped and a 'touch anywhere to drag your ship around' approach was brought in. Now you could move your ship without worrying about thumb placement / obscurance and you just tapped on a ship to shoot at it. Simples (although getting to that point left me with far less hair than I'd started with).

 

'Allo!

So with the basic bits of the game in place, we had waves of enemies spawning, flying around and what not, we polished off the rest of the assets.

Since everything zips past at a fairly quick rate most of the assets were modelled without too much detail in either the geometry or textures and all of the key assets noted before were cut down to help keep things moving at a smooth rate. The modelling workflow is fairly standard, basic primitives pushed around a little, colour coded for easy UV grouping and textured using photoref. The materials were swapped from our custom PBR shader to the Unity standard one once we moved the project over to Unity 5.



The boss ships and any large geometry (to keep the texture size as low as possible) made use of a base texture that was essentially colour with intricate details being pulled out from the detail layer (another low res texture which tiled) in the standard shader.



The base assets use combination of random scales and rotations to help keep things a little more varied.

Backgrounds were an interesting challenge - trying to avoid the whole low res skybox that a lot of space games seem to suffer with we ended up using a whole lot of planes to try and get everything working (without mobile platforms crying about the alpha coverage). The aim was to try to keep the backgrounds moving (be it particles, asteroids, scrolling textures, etc.) Heres a selection :



I'm just putting together a small smattering of gameplay footage at the moment so I'll be popping that here once its done. Let me know if you have any feedback of any kind on this stuff!

 

CALL FOR BETA PLAYERS!

Fancy giving Dark Star a play? I've popped a sign up form over at:

http://www.thatwonderfullemon.co/updates/dark-star-beta-test/

And here are some gameplay clips (set against inappropriately epic music) so you know what your getting yourself into

 

There is a game on steam called Darkstar One, you may want to rethink your name considering it's so similar and internet searches for one may lead people to the other. You want a unique name for brand recognition.

I had a Darkstar project underway until I did my due diligence. Now is the time you want to change before you start plastering it all over the internet. Just fyi...

Project looks good though...

 

@digiross - good point! I'll have to have a think on this over the weekend.

 

Now that you dont have virtual stick controls on mobile, does that mean you've made the game "too easy" with a real stick on PC? (IE: An xbox controller?) or are you planning on a heavily modified PC experience?

 

Hey @ironbellystudios - Challange wise DS should be pretty much even regardless of the platform you play on. There is no point sacrificing one platform for another if something just doesn't work!

Originally, the control sticks fuctioned as you'd expect a shooter to work (left stick for movement, the right stick for targetting). The flying felt great on both mobile and PC but the targetting was lacking. Also there were considerations such as - finger / thumb placement, visability and a really strange disconnect between movement and targetting (akin to rubbing your tummy and patting your head).

In the tweaked up system, on mobile / tablet, almost the entire screen acts as the left stick for movement (when held, poked, dragged or swipped) and a tap on a target registers for a short lock on and auto fire. (Most non-hardcore players that played the game before this change wanted to drag the ship around, so to me this actually made a lot more intuative sense).

On PC, WASD and mouse work pretty well - as the mouse is fast enough to nip across the screen to target things.

Hopefully our beta test will show up any problem areas with the controls or difficualty spikes per platform. Our current plan is to run a number of small tests targetting different platforms (phone, tablets PC's and 'normal' PC's).

Xbox and other controllers are currently on the sideline for the first release of the project as they are going to need a lot of love and consideration.